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So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a reall

So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house. Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/. The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world. As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Limiting in-game communication systems severely * Penalizing players for playing in groups I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator. What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked. Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.

pdenya 13y ago
I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot. Still play D2 on occasion though.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  I'm sort of done of D2, but I've found Torchlight 2 to be an excellent replacement for Diablo. No auction house, and it fixes the most annoying parts (IMHO) of D3 and D2: weak, boring bosses and weak skills, respectively. I played a ton of D2, but I always was disappointed that, with the exception of gimmick builds which could barely make it to Nightmare, you were limited to one or two viable builds for each character. Put more than one point into Firebolt? Too bad for you. As for D3, I almost finished my first playthrough without drinking a single health potion. Not exactly the nail-biting, walking the razor's edge gameplay I had come to expect from Diablo.
  - tieTYT 13y ago
    I haven't played D1/2/3 but I've played torchlight 1-2. I don't like TL2. For some reason when I play TL2 I'm very aware that the next thing I'll be doing is the thing I'm already doing. Playing the game feels pointless. Yes, I'll have better gear but the bad guys will be stronger so "so what?" The skills I'd get for leveling up seemed pointless too. I can pick between an attack that explodes this way or that explodes that way. Maybe it'll explode and freeze the enemies for 1 second. Meh. Maybe this is me just getting old. But I didn't feel this way about TL1.
    - hobs 13y ago
      Yeah, I avoided that feeling at first, but I think its a bit of the art style being a little too cartoonish. I know its stupid, but when I see hack and slash + cartoons I just start thinking of browser games. In torchlight I think they needed to work a wee bit harder on differentiation of the characters and places you visit. I couldn't name one character from torchlight 2. (And I am on act 2.5)
      - tieTYT 13y ago
        Your second paragraph is very relevant to my feelings. "Same actions, new background" is pretty much how I felt when playing. I think I may have gotten to act 2.5, too.
        talmir 13y ago
        I finished the game.. I wont spoil the end, but it felt very anti-climatic. More a "Oh, I am fighting the end boss? I didnt realize..." rather than a "Oh cool! I'm about to fight the end boss! Better get ready!"
- thefreeman 13y ago
  If you liked D2 You should try Path of Exile. It retains a lot of the great things from D2 while bringing some unique twists of its own, like "currency items" rather then a gold based economy and gigantic passive skill trees.
stormbrew 13y ago
For me it wasn't the auction house that made me loathe to replay the game, it was the lack of character customization. Item choice is purely about HPS and damage reduction, with all other attributes more or less useless, and the ability to customize your skill loadout at will made it so you never invested in a consistent character. Why would you ever roll another character of a class if it's just going to be the exact same thing in the end? No I may be unusual in this, I played a lot of D2, but never at a very high level. I would come back to it every few months or after a year of not playing it and roll a new character with some different skill tree choices and have a somewhat different experience each time. I never made it to nightmare, never had a level 99 character, but I found the game a lot of fun. D3 is just too much about the end-game for me, there's no journey.
- josh2600 13y ago
  I had a bunch of toons at level 97; the last 3 levels have the same experience requirement as the first 96, so it's a lot of work to get to 99. The problems with D3 are manifold, but they all, at least to my mind, come back to wanting to monetize gameplay elements when they should've monetized cosmetics. It's like Blizzard/Activision took a big hit of the EA koolaid and forgot how to make good games. It didn't help that they fired all of Blizzard North back in the day... If you ever meet a Blizzard North developer, ask them about what it was like. It's an incredible, really just incredible, story of how NOT to treat developers.
jerf 13y ago
The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems engineering in general, is that systems react. You can not look at an existing system, then say "Ah, this system is doing X, so I shall do Y which will cause the result Z, and nothing else." In this case, you can't look at the D2 community, and say, "Ah ha, I shall inject this system for extracting money, and therefore it shall be exactly like the original situation except I shall be making money." The system reacts. This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors. Especially when the participant in question is by far the largest participant. I actually disagree that the root problem is that they put "profit over gameplay". The root problem is that they made changes designed to create profit, but failed to correctly understand how the rest of the system would react. There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully, but whatever that way is it's going to be something more subtle than the Auction House was. I'd suggest looking at how Valve has monetized the hell out of Team Fortress 2 if you're trying to find a positive example. It's mind boggling what they've pulled off there, and observe that, like I said, it's a great deal more subtle than "let's just put up some payment gates!!1!". MMORPGs also provide a variety of interesting compare & contrasts, especially with the recent successes of the free-to-play models to compare to the WoW subscription/expansion model.
- josh2600 13y ago
  I'd argue the difference is how the complex ecosystems handled parasites. On the one hand, Blizzard enabled balance-breaking monetization, and TF2 enabled costume-breaking monetization. Blizzard could've made just as much (or a lot more really) money just by enabling cosmetic rewards instead of gameplay rewards. I feel like I quote this once a week [0] but Cory Doctorow makes a ton of great points on this and related subjects in the linked essay. [0]http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    It's worth nothing that Blizzard did exactly that in World of Warcraft.
yngccc 13y ago
I unsubscribed myself from all Blizzard game After the D3 fiasco. Blizzard is no longer the same company it once was. There are so many issues but I think it ultimately boil down to treating their customers as drug addicts rather than intelligent human beings. The worst offenders being dumb down game mechanics to cater to the lowest common denominator, WoW daily quests, always online DRM and of course the D3 AH.
FD3SA 13y ago
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc). D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear. The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Tying ability damage to weapon DPS was the worst mistake they made, in my opinion. Not only did it make zero sense but also made all character classes feel the same in terms of itemization.
  - pmiller2 13y ago
    It also did a pretty good job crippling the Barbarian at higher levels.
    - josh2600 13y ago
      You do realize, and I don't know if this is still true, but at one time the barbarians were, by far, the dominant class in D3? They do ungodly amounts of damage and they're super Tanky. There's an 8 second Azmodan kill on Inferno by a Barb. Just saying, the barbs were actually imbalanced horribly.
- vehementi 13y ago
  Didn't help that every level 60 demon hunter is literally identical except gear. I can take your guy and put on my gear and continue where I left off.
  - 13y ago
tieTYT 13y ago
> Limiting in-game communication systems severely I haven't played either game. Was this just done because they didn't have enough time to make it better? > Penalizing players for playing in groups How did they accomplish this? How was it better in D2?
- emef 13y ago
  Playing in groups initially increased the difficulty to the point of near impossibility in the end-game, with little to no extra reward.
stopcodon 13y ago
I played Diablo 1 and 2 for many years, and pre-ordered Diablo 3 like you. I ended up playing for a few weeks and haven't touched it since for the following reasons: The auction systems - didn't like them for the exact reason the linked article states. There was no "fun" in trying to get gear in the actual game anymore. I used to enjoy "Magic Finding" to gear new characters. Only 4 people per game (versus 8 in Diablo 2) - At launch, myself and the 5-6 people I played D2 with all wanted to play together and simply couldn't. I suspect this to be related to the fact they planned to release it on consoles from the start. Unrelated to this complaint, but I also found the interface to be suspiciously optimized for console controls instead of keyboard and mouse. "Matchmaking" - Part of the fun of D1 and D2 (in my opinion) was joining player created games (with names specified by the players). PvP games, trade games, chat games, hide and seek, specific quests, magic finding, levelling, boss runs etc. In Diablo 3 this was taken away. You were just thrown into a game with people on the same quest as you. To me this destroyed a significant part of the community that kept people playing D2 as long as they did. In the time I played after launch it was difficult to get in a game with anyone willing to communicate, or who actually spoke the same language. Fewer skills/choices in placing attributes - Self-explanatory. D3 dumbed down the process of "building" your character to the point where no matter what you do you'll have a viable build. No more creating a character around a specific skill or item you like just to see if you could optimize it despite the disadvantage of it not being a mainstream build. No PvP at launch - Again, self-explanatory. No idea if this was patched in at some point.
alex_c 13y ago
I agree with your experience, but I disagree with your conclusions re: cause and effect. Specifically: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Penalizing players for playing in groups I suspect these were simply misguided design decisions aimed at making the game "challenging". Difficulty was entirely out of whack at launch across the entire game (yes, partly because the developers vastly underestimated the effect of the AH), and I suspect this was simply part of it. * Limiting in-game communication systems severely I have no way to prove it, but I'm almost certain this was a result of some bizarre political battle inside Blizzard. Battle.net 2.0 came out with Starcraft 2 with the same boneheaded decisions - no chat rooms, the RealID fiasco, etc. - and Diablo 3 simply inherited that mess. There HAVE to be people inside Blizzard who understand why players might find chat rooms valuable, but for some reason they never made themselves heard. I don't think this has much to do with the AH.
- ordinary 13y ago
  There have been public complaints from Blizzard employees about Battle.net. Community managers and developers both have stated that improvements to Battle.net are far harder to push through than changes to the games proper. Why exactly this is, I'm not sure. My guess would be that it's either seriously understaffed or drowning in bureaucracy.
  - alex_c 13y ago
    I can see it being more difficult to modify, since it powers all Blizzard games. That also raises another option - it's a technical mess that no one wants to touch...
    - GoodIntentions 13y ago
      >> it powers all Blizzard games I could see that forcing a proper test cycle to take longer than implementing a change.
  - chc 13y ago
    I'd bet it's drowning in bureaucracy for a reason — Battle.net is a common component in virtually everything the company creates, so any change to it will impact a lot of people's work in unforeseen ways.
ordinary 13y ago
I remember the endless complaints about how hard Diablo 3 was at launch. I therefore find it hard to believe you were able to accumulate enough ingame gold to buy gear 'within a few days' that allowed you to handle 'most everything', except by buying gold. In games like Diablo, buying ingame items or currency is roughly analogous to shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon, because you effectively remove the end-game for yourself. I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now. People are no longer penalized longer and longer for dying and playing in groups is now actively rewarded. I would quite seriously invite you to give the game a second try. Diablo 3 is by no means a perfect game (for example, public game discovery is still abysmal, and ingame communication is practically non-existent), but it has improved a lot since it came out, in many small but significant ways. I fully expect that the expansion will further improve the game, as indeed it did for Diablo 2.
- josh2600 13y ago
  So... In 2 days, I was in Inferno. That was not the intention of the game designers. I never bought ingame currency, but I know the laws of supply and demand and dealt with the game accordingly. If you're telling me that I should've just pretended the AH didn't exist, I would say that you're telling me not to play D3. I wish people like you would stop telling me how to feel. I don't think you have some superposition that lets you judge me and I wish you'd separate me from my opinions. I am a person, I have opinions, but when you say "people like me" you lump me into a general audience and I don't think that's ok. I don't speak for anyone other than myself. I would quite seriously invite you to consider that I invested a lot of time into D3 and played through a number of updates. I know exactly what I wanted out of a D3 experience and I can tell you in excruciating detail how it failed; this isn't the time or place for that. The fact is, it took almost a decade for the game to come out, why the fuck did it have to ship as an unplayable pile of crap? Sorry, I'm not trying to be offensive, but you're asking for patience when, as a consumer, I've been basically told that my investment in the game isn't enough for Blizzard: they need to make money off of my invested hours as well. I'm happy that Blizzard is improving the game but I'm not willing to give them any more of my time after what I view as a waste of my time. It's true Diablo games improve over time, but wow was D3 a steaming pile of garbage when it launched. I mean if they had just implemented D2 with new graphics and content, it would've been glorious. Anyways, I'm sorry to rant, but the crux of my point is that you can't attack me personally for my opinions and expect to have a good discussion. I concede the point that Blizzard might be getting better, but it also doesn't matter, for me.
scragg 13y ago
I played for a bit, not as much as you. Couldn't they have made items "bind on equip" and/or "bind on pickup" similar to WoW instead of dropping the AH all together? Seems like dropping the AH will just create 3rd party marketplaces and trading instead.
- thefreeman 13y ago
  A problem with that solution is that the loot system was so garbage that you could likely go through multiple playthroughs without finding a single decent item for your character. At least when I played, most uniques were completely inferior to highly rolled magic items from the end game. It was basically at the point where your only real choice end game was to grind gold to buy items, it wasn't even worth it to try to search for items.
- thisisnotatest 13y ago
  I had the idea of limited-transfer items. For example, an item can be bound to three characters; once the third character picks it up, it's non-transferable. This would let me give my friend the bow I don't need, or even sell something once, but items wouldn't be infinitely fungible any more.
- PapstJL4U 13y ago
  "bind on equip" and "bind on pickup" are terrible ideas for games like Diablo. Trading with friends, strangers or your own characters is part of the fun.
meerita 13y ago
I had the same experience. I played the beta like 2000 times before the released gamme. The game until patch 1.03 was totally hard to play and it was rewarding to play bacause you could die. But after this patch they've made all the "so hard difficulty" inferno totally easy. Then, they added a 5th level of difficulty and just because they've broke the initial one and so on. Now ppl farm MP 10 with ease. This news proves many things. One of them is a different game direction. Yes… no more Jay Wilson scourge.
DigitalJack 13y ago
The idea of grinding doesn't make sense period.
- josh2600 13y ago
  It does if the rewards aren't monetizable because of their ability to break the game. People grind for hats in TF2 all day, and by getting a hat you don't break the game. The problem is when you reward people with things that break the game. Don't break the game for profit; simple, no?
d3gamer 13y ago
"...just an absolute pleasure to play." So you're saying that you actually haven't played past Act 2 in Inferno difficulty pre-1.03 patch
lackbeard 13y ago
How do you know that Blizzard's reasons for making the "game inhibiting decisions" you list are a result of their desire to monetize with the RMAH?
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
People occasionally wonder why I'm so into indie games these days, even the ugly ones and the pretentiously arty ones and the three-minute-long ones. It seems to me that that indies are passionate about making games. They don't always have the skill or resources to reach their potential, but you can feel that passion even in something banged together for a 24-hour jam. It's refreshing. The big studios, or at least the people who call the shots at the big studios, are passionate about making money, and they're not a bit shy about throwing out great gameplay for more money. Every "monetization" decision beyond "here's our game, it costs $umpty" is an exercise in making your game worse on purpose and then charging to bring it back up to baseline. Occasionally, these decisions are made with enough care and subtlety that the overall experience remains almost as good as it could've been...but not usually.
martindale 13y ago
I don't understand how so many of these top-tier organizations miss the simple axiom of truth; build a great product.
b0rsuk 13y ago
I like the way Tei from Rock Paper Shotgun forums put it: "Diablo 3 is not PvP or PvE, it's PvAH."
BillyMaize 13y ago
I also loved Diablo 1 and 2, but did not like the gameplay of Diablo 3 at all as it felt too simplistic. The thing I was worried about, however, was seeing the auction house being successful and this kind of nonsense becoming mainstream. It is bad enough we have day 1 DLC, special preorder offers which give overpowered items, and special currencies which buy the best items. But being able to simply throw money at a game to be good at it? What is the point in playing the game? Players should have to play the game and be good at it to earn/unlock items and achievements and this experiment shows that players don't want to be able to rush themselves through it because it is the experience that counts, not the end goal.

pdenya 13y ago

I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot. Still play D2 on occasion though.

TheCraiggers 13y ago
I'm sort of done of D2, but I've found Torchlight 2 to be an excellent replacement for Diablo. No auction house, and it fixes the most annoying parts (IMHO) of D3 and D2: weak, boring bosses and weak skills, respectively. I played a ton of D2, but I always was disappointed that, with the exception of gimmick builds which could barely make it to Nightmare, you were limited to one or two viable builds for each character. Put more than one point into Firebolt? Too bad for you. As for D3, I almost finished my first playthrough without drinking a single health potion. Not exactly the nail-biting, walking the razor's edge gameplay I had come to expect from Diablo.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  I haven't played D1/2/3 but I've played torchlight 1-2. I don't like TL2. For some reason when I play TL2 I'm very aware that the next thing I'll be doing is the thing I'm already doing. Playing the game feels pointless. Yes, I'll have better gear but the bad guys will be stronger so "so what?" The skills I'd get for leveling up seemed pointless too. I can pick between an attack that explodes this way or that explodes that way. Maybe it'll explode and freeze the enemies for 1 second. Meh. Maybe this is me just getting old. But I didn't feel this way about TL1.
  - hobs 13y ago
    Yeah, I avoided that feeling at first, but I think its a bit of the art style being a little too cartoonish. I know its stupid, but when I see hack and slash + cartoons I just start thinking of browser games. In torchlight I think they needed to work a wee bit harder on differentiation of the characters and places you visit. I couldn't name one character from torchlight 2. (And I am on act 2.5)
    - tieTYT 13y ago
      Your second paragraph is very relevant to my feelings. "Same actions, new background" is pretty much how I felt when playing. I think I may have gotten to act 2.5, too.
      - talmir 13y ago
        I finished the game.. I wont spoil the end, but it felt very anti-climatic. More a "Oh, I am fighting the end boss? I didnt realize..." rather than a "Oh cool! I'm about to fight the end boss! Better get ready!"
thefreeman 13y ago
If you liked D2 You should try Path of Exile. It retains a lot of the great things from D2 while bringing some unique twists of its own, like "currency items" rather then a gold based economy and gigantic passive skill trees.

stormbrew 13y ago

For me it wasn't the auction house that made me loathe to replay the game, it was the lack of character customization. Item choice is purely about HPS and damage reduction, with all other attributes more or less useless, and the ability to customize your skill loadout at will made it so you never invested in a consistent character. Why would you ever roll another character of a class if it's just going to be the exact same thing in the end? No I may be unusual in this, I played a lot of D2, but never at a very high level. I would come back to it every few months or after a year of not playing it and roll a new character with some different skill tree choices and have a somewhat different experience each time. I never made it to nightmare, never had a level 99 character, but I found the game a lot of fun. D3 is just too much about the end-game for me, there's no journey.

josh2600 13y ago
I had a bunch of toons at level 97; the last 3 levels have the same experience requirement as the first 96, so it's a lot of work to get to 99. The problems with D3 are manifold, but they all, at least to my mind, come back to wanting to monetize gameplay elements when they should've monetized cosmetics. It's like Blizzard/Activision took a big hit of the EA koolaid and forgot how to make good games. It didn't help that they fired all of Blizzard North back in the day... If you ever meet a Blizzard North developer, ask them about what it was like. It's an incredible, really just incredible, story of how NOT to treat developers.

jerf 13y ago

The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems engineering in general, is that systems react. You can not look at an existing system, then say "Ah, this system is doing X, so I shall do Y which will cause the result Z, and nothing else." In this case, you can't look at the D2 community, and say, "Ah ha, I shall inject this system for extracting money, and therefore it shall be exactly like the original situation except I shall be making money." The system reacts. This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors. Especially when the participant in question is by far the largest participant. I actually disagree that the root problem is that they put "profit over gameplay". The root problem is that they made changes designed to create profit, but failed to correctly understand how the rest of the system would react. There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully, but whatever that way is it's going to be something more subtle than the Auction House was. I'd suggest looking at how Valve has monetized the hell out of Team Fortress 2 if you're trying to find a positive example. It's mind boggling what they've pulled off there, and observe that, like I said, it's a great deal more subtle than "let's just put up some payment gates!!1!". MMORPGs also provide a variety of interesting compare & contrasts, especially with the recent successes of the free-to-play models to compare to the WoW subscription/expansion model.

josh2600 13y ago
I'd argue the difference is how the complex ecosystems handled parasites. On the one hand, Blizzard enabled balance-breaking monetization, and TF2 enabled costume-breaking monetization. Blizzard could've made just as much (or a lot more really) money just by enabling cosmetic rewards instead of gameplay rewards. I feel like I quote this once a week [0] but Cory Doctorow makes a ton of great points on this and related subjects in the linked essay. [0]http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
- minimaxir 13y ago
  It's worth nothing that Blizzard did exactly that in World of Warcraft.

yngccc 13y ago

I unsubscribed myself from all Blizzard game After the D3 fiasco. Blizzard is no longer the same company it once was. There are so many issues but I think it ultimately boil down to treating their customers as drug addicts rather than intelligent human beings. The worst offenders being dumb down game mechanics to cater to the lowest common denominator, WoW daily quests, always online DRM and of course the D3 AH.

FD3SA 13y ago

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc). D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear. The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.

enraged_camel 13y ago
Tying ability damage to weapon DPS was the worst mistake they made, in my opinion. Not only did it make zero sense but also made all character classes feel the same in terms of itemization.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  It also did a pretty good job crippling the Barbarian at higher levels.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    You do realize, and I don't know if this is still true, but at one time the barbarians were, by far, the dominant class in D3? They do ungodly amounts of damage and they're super Tanky. There's an 8 second Azmodan kill on Inferno by a Barb. Just saying, the barbs were actually imbalanced horribly.
vehementi 13y ago
Didn't help that every level 60 demon hunter is literally identical except gear. I can take your guy and put on my gear and continue where I left off.
- 13y ago

tieTYT 13y ago

> Limiting in-game communication systems severely I haven't played either game. Was this just done because they didn't have enough time to make it better? > Penalizing players for playing in groups How did they accomplish this? How was it better in D2?

emef 13y ago
Playing in groups initially increased the difficulty to the point of near impossibility in the end-game, with little to no extra reward.

stopcodon 13y ago

I played Diablo 1 and 2 for many years, and pre-ordered Diablo 3 like you. I ended up playing for a few weeks and haven't touched it since for the following reasons: The auction systems - didn't like them for the exact reason the linked article states. There was no "fun" in trying to get gear in the actual game anymore. I used to enjoy "Magic Finding" to gear new characters. Only 4 people per game (versus 8 in Diablo 2) - At launch, myself and the 5-6 people I played D2 with all wanted to play together and simply couldn't. I suspect this to be related to the fact they planned to release it on consoles from the start. Unrelated to this complaint, but I also found the interface to be suspiciously optimized for console controls instead of keyboard and mouse. "Matchmaking" - Part of the fun of D1 and D2 (in my opinion) was joining player created games (with names specified by the players). PvP games, trade games, chat games, hide and seek, specific quests, magic finding, levelling, boss runs etc. In Diablo 3 this was taken away. You were just thrown into a game with people on the same quest as you. To me this destroyed a significant part of the community that kept people playing D2 as long as they did. In the time I played after launch it was difficult to get in a game with anyone willing to communicate, or who actually spoke the same language. Fewer skills/choices in placing attributes - Self-explanatory. D3 dumbed down the process of "building" your character to the point where no matter what you do you'll have a viable build. No more creating a character around a specific skill or item you like just to see if you could optimize it despite the disadvantage of it not being a mainstream build. No PvP at launch - Again, self-explanatory. No idea if this was patched in at some point.

alex_c 13y ago

I agree with your experience, but I disagree with your conclusions re: cause and effect. Specifically: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Penalizing players for playing in groups I suspect these were simply misguided design decisions aimed at making the game "challenging". Difficulty was entirely out of whack at launch across the entire game (yes, partly because the developers vastly underestimated the effect of the AH), and I suspect this was simply part of it. * Limiting in-game communication systems severely I have no way to prove it, but I'm almost certain this was a result of some bizarre political battle inside Blizzard. Battle.net 2.0 came out with Starcraft 2 with the same boneheaded decisions - no chat rooms, the RealID fiasco, etc. - and Diablo 3 simply inherited that mess. There HAVE to be people inside Blizzard who understand why players might find chat rooms valuable, but for some reason they never made themselves heard. I don't think this has much to do with the AH.

ordinary 13y ago
There have been public complaints from Blizzard employees about Battle.net. Community managers and developers both have stated that improvements to Battle.net are far harder to push through than changes to the games proper. Why exactly this is, I'm not sure. My guess would be that it's either seriously understaffed or drowning in bureaucracy.
- alex_c 13y ago
  I can see it being more difficult to modify, since it powers all Blizzard games. That also raises another option - it's a technical mess that no one wants to touch...
  - GoodIntentions 13y ago
    >> it powers all Blizzard games I could see that forcing a proper test cycle to take longer than implementing a change.
- chc 13y ago
  I'd bet it's drowning in bureaucracy for a reason — Battle.net is a common component in virtually everything the company creates, so any change to it will impact a lot of people's work in unforeseen ways.

ordinary 13y ago

I remember the endless complaints about how hard Diablo 3 was at launch. I therefore find it hard to believe you were able to accumulate enough ingame gold to buy gear 'within a few days' that allowed you to handle 'most everything', except by buying gold. In games like Diablo, buying ingame items or currency is roughly analogous to shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon, because you effectively remove the end-game for yourself. I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now. People are no longer penalized longer and longer for dying and playing in groups is now actively rewarded. I would quite seriously invite you to give the game a second try. Diablo 3 is by no means a perfect game (for example, public game discovery is still abysmal, and ingame communication is practically non-existent), but it has improved a lot since it came out, in many small but significant ways. I fully expect that the expansion will further improve the game, as indeed it did for Diablo 2.

josh2600 13y ago
So... In 2 days, I was in Inferno. That was not the intention of the game designers. I never bought ingame currency, but I know the laws of supply and demand and dealt with the game accordingly. If you're telling me that I should've just pretended the AH didn't exist, I would say that you're telling me not to play D3. I wish people like you would stop telling me how to feel. I don't think you have some superposition that lets you judge me and I wish you'd separate me from my opinions. I am a person, I have opinions, but when you say "people like me" you lump me into a general audience and I don't think that's ok. I don't speak for anyone other than myself. I would quite seriously invite you to consider that I invested a lot of time into D3 and played through a number of updates. I know exactly what I wanted out of a D3 experience and I can tell you in excruciating detail how it failed; this isn't the time or place for that. The fact is, it took almost a decade for the game to come out, why the fuck did it have to ship as an unplayable pile of crap? Sorry, I'm not trying to be offensive, but you're asking for patience when, as a consumer, I've been basically told that my investment in the game isn't enough for Blizzard: they need to make money off of my invested hours as well. I'm happy that Blizzard is improving the game but I'm not willing to give them any more of my time after what I view as a waste of my time. It's true Diablo games improve over time, but wow was D3 a steaming pile of garbage when it launched. I mean if they had just implemented D2 with new graphics and content, it would've been glorious. Anyways, I'm sorry to rant, but the crux of my point is that you can't attack me personally for my opinions and expect to have a good discussion. I concede the point that Blizzard might be getting better, but it also doesn't matter, for me.

scragg 13y ago

I played for a bit, not as much as you. Couldn't they have made items "bind on equip" and/or "bind on pickup" similar to WoW instead of dropping the AH all together? Seems like dropping the AH will just create 3rd party marketplaces and trading instead.

thefreeman 13y ago
A problem with that solution is that the loot system was so garbage that you could likely go through multiple playthroughs without finding a single decent item for your character. At least when I played, most uniques were completely inferior to highly rolled magic items from the end game. It was basically at the point where your only real choice end game was to grind gold to buy items, it wasn't even worth it to try to search for items.
thisisnotatest 13y ago
I had the idea of limited-transfer items. For example, an item can be bound to three characters; once the third character picks it up, it's non-transferable. This would let me give my friend the bow I don't need, or even sell something once, but items wouldn't be infinitely fungible any more.
PapstJL4U 13y ago
"bind on equip" and "bind on pickup" are terrible ideas for games like Diablo. Trading with friends, strangers or your own characters is part of the fun.

meerita 13y ago

I had the same experience. I played the beta like 2000 times before the released gamme. The game until patch 1.03 was totally hard to play and it was rewarding to play bacause you could die. But after this patch they've made all the "so hard difficulty" inferno totally easy. Then, they added a 5th level of difficulty and just because they've broke the initial one and so on. Now ppl farm MP 10 with ease. This news proves many things. One of them is a different game direction. Yes… no more Jay Wilson scourge.

DigitalJack 13y ago

The idea of grinding doesn't make sense period.

josh2600 13y ago
It does if the rewards aren't monetizable because of their ability to break the game. People grind for hats in TF2 all day, and by getting a hat you don't break the game. The problem is when you reward people with things that break the game. Don't break the game for profit; simple, no?

d3gamer 13y ago

"...just an absolute pleasure to play." So you're saying that you actually haven't played past Act 2 in Inferno difficulty pre-1.03 patch

lackbeard 13y ago

How do you know that Blizzard's reasons for making the "game inhibiting decisions" you list are a result of their desire to monetize with the RMAH?

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

People occasionally wonder why I'm so into indie games these days, even the ugly ones and the pretentiously arty ones and the three-minute-long ones. It seems to me that that indies are passionate about making games. They don't always have the skill or resources to reach their potential, but you can feel that passion even in something banged together for a 24-hour jam. It's refreshing. The big studios, or at least the people who call the shots at the big studios, are passionate about making money, and they're not a bit shy about throwing out great gameplay for more money. Every "monetization" decision beyond "here's our game, it costs $umpty" is an exercise in making your game worse on purpose and then charging to bring it back up to baseline. Occasionally, these decisions are made with enough care and subtlety that the overall experience remains almost as good as it could've been...but not usually.

martindale 13y ago

I don't understand how so many of these top-tier organizations miss the simple axiom of truth; build a great product.

b0rsuk 13y ago

I like the way Tei from Rock Paper Shotgun forums put it: "Diablo 3 is not PvP or PvE, it's PvAH."

BillyMaize 13y ago

I also loved Diablo 1 and 2, but did not like the gameplay of Diablo 3 at all as it felt too simplistic. The thing I was worried about, however, was seeing the auction house being successful and this kind of nonsense becoming mainstream. It is bad enough we have day 1 DLC, special preorder offers which give overpowered items, and special currencies which buy the best items. But being able to simply throw money at a game to be good at it? What is the point in playing the game? Players should have to play the game and be good at it to earn/unlock items and achievements and this experiment shows that players don't want to be able to rush themselves through it because it is the experience that counts, not the end goal.